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Double-Up Discussion: Fireflight, Sloth Hop

In Sloth Hop, you have to guide a little sloth along a river that is laden with rocks. Honestly, the last time I saw a river so full of stepping stones was during a drought. Getting the sloth from the bottom to the top of the screen is a matter of tapping on the next squares in front of your sloth. In true sloth fashion, he doesn’t visually move, you technically move the board by tapping on the screen. Don’t tap on the water tiles, though. That will end the game and your sloth gets wet. Because the last thing a fuzzy animal that has a small fucking ecosystem in its hair needs is a bath, right? The game has three different modes of play: survival, time, distance.

Survival is the first and by far the toughest mode in this game. When you start, it looks just like the other modes, with one catch: the screen moves. Where you set the speed that you tap in other modes, in this one you have to tap frantically along with the scroll of the screen. I never made it far in this mode. The second game mode is time. Time is a little easier and its main feature is the timer in the corner. As you tap along through the stone path in the river, the time runs longer and longer. At the end of the round, the time it took you to jump to the end of the river. Every time you exceed your score, it is saved! The last mode of the game is a reverse version of the time mode. Instead of running up, the timer starts at 30 seconds and ticks down. You tap along as far as you can get in that time, and the number of stones you jumped across is saved. The best score, again is saved.

Apparently sloths and cats alike hate water, both desperately need to be bathed.

Sloth Hop focuses on one thing: Digital dexterity. It all depends on how good you are at hitting the little rocks that you have to jump across. It is a fun little waste of time that you can use to fill in that space waiting for the train. The game itself is free, so its downsides can’t really be that bad right? Right? Try playing this game for a bit. One thing you will notice, and come to fucking hate, are the ads. After every single game that you play, your celebratory screen will be thrown over by this fucking ad to play someone else’s game. It is really irritating, and you can probably blame that shit on the nature of the App distribution systems.

Fireflight: Vengeance is an interesting game that follows the standard of more popular SNES genre games, such as Desert Strike and Zero Wing. You control a fucking dragon. Awesome. This dragon breathes fire all over everything and kills enemies. Of course, unlike other games where there is little resistance against the awesome power of your incinerating blasts, in this game enemy dragons, ballistas and magic towers shoot fire, balls of energy and lightning at you. You have to dodge the enemies and their attacks while simultaneously killing them.

One of the most important elements of this game is the money you collect. Throughout the level, you have to collect gold coins. These coins add up slowly, but you’ll play through a few times at first. The first few times you play, you will get totaled. Your first few plays don’t end wll, but as you get used to the starting conditions, slow flight, slow attacks etc., you will get better. As your coins accrue, you will be able to buy better and better upgrades. After a few plays, I was able to get enough coins to buy an upgrade that made me launch fireballs faster and faster. This is another free game, so it is worthwhile to download it and at least give it a try.

Shoot ’em all!

Things in this that pissed me off the most aligned with the things that usually bother me about newly downloaded mobile games. Getting a hold of the controls at first is fucking aggravating. I almost didn’t make it past the first level, but once I put a little thought and effort into the game, I got used to it. One of the most frustrating things about the controls is how the speed that your dragon flies depends on how far away you tap from where your dragon is at the time of tapping. There is also the in-game purchases. Those are also reasonable, though, giving you 2,000 coins, which will get you 4 base upgrades, for a nominal sum of 1.99$. Not too shabby. So jump in and get your game on, these are some pretty fun titles, overall.